Wednesday, 29 December 2010

Four tough questions for the secular right

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1. What do you want? And what do you not want?

Is your list any more than a mere wish list? If so, what binds-together these core values and necessary exclusions?

2. Having listed these requirements, is it possible to sustain a society which gives you what you want, and not what you do not want? What are the mechanisms by which your ideal society would be maintained? Are they plausible? Are they strong enough?

Or are you just engaged in day-dreaming?

(Anyone can come up with their own ideal utopia - but in the real world, stable options are heavily constrained.)

3. How would your ideal society stop itself recapitulating the course of all existing Western societies?

In other words, what is to prevent the re-emergence of radicalism, communism, socialism and political correctness? - in other words, what is to prevent the return of that suicidal embrace of active self-destruction which prevailed in all Western societies, at more or less the same time, apparently independently.

4. In such a society as you conceive, what will motivate people? And are these motivations plausibly strong enough to resist relentless, implacable and dedicated foes who cannot be convinced of the virtues of your favoured society and who are prepared to sacrifice pleasure, experience pain, and even willingly to die to get what they want?

Because these are people which will try to destroy modernity and which must therefore be-stopped for modernity to survive; and since they will not voluntarily stop themselves from doing this, who will stop-them?

Who (in your ideal society) will draw a line and fight and (if necessary) die to stop people who otherwise will not stop?

And why, in your ideal society, will the people who matter, really do this, actually make their best efforts to stop implacable and highly-motivated foes when we know that such people will not do so at present (will indeed assist the implacable foes of modernity).

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At root this is just one question: what would be different about your desired secular society which would plausibly make it self-maintaining when all previous secular societies have become progressively more self-destroying?

28 comments:

By "secular right" I assume you refer to people who share a conservative disposition and "right wing" attitudes, but who are, broadly speaking, irreligious or even atheist.

In my experience such people are not common. Leaving aside the extremes of outright communism and fascism, isn't the political centre occupied by secular liberals and conservatives with religious sympathies? In other words, aren't most people who describe themselves as being "on the right" also inclined to believe in a religion?

There is little to fear from the social ideals (if any) of the "secular right" because it hardly exists, I think.

The mainstream right in Western countries is merely secular progressivism-and-water; being almost-purely secular - pursuing utilitarian policies - and being very-nearly as politically correct as the left (say, about five years behind).

The right is de facto secular except insofar as it is actively anti-Christian. If you don't see this, I can only presume it is because you yourself are secular or non-Christian?

(Of course, I can say nothing about what the avowedly religious mainstream Republicans, Conservatives and Libertarians believe in their souls (after all, people as diverse as Obama and the Archbishop of Canterbury are avowedly Christian) - but it makes all-but no observable difference to their social and public policies. :=) )

I don't get what you mean by 'fearing' the secular right. I don't 'fear' the secular right; after all I was an active member of the secular right until just a few years ago - I am merely trying to demonstrate that they are mistaken.

In so far as the mainstream right has been seduced by progressivism, it's difficult to distinguish it from the pervasive liberalism that infects all Western societies at this time. Apart from some dissenting voices such as yours which are heard on the internet, contemporary public debate discusses very little that doesn't in some important respect advance a cause of secular humanism.

Differences in economic and social opinion between modern political parties with mass appeal are negligible. After much posturing, it's a case of Tweedle-Dum or Tweedle-Dee producing a Godbole Effect - i.e. you can say what you like but the outcome will be the same.

I can't think of a single politician with any influence in the present UK administration whom I would describe, without equivocation, as being on the secular right. All are liberals or socialists operating under various flags of convenience or in various degrees of commitment. Are there any reactionary atheists lurking on the Coalition benches?

If, when you were an active member of the secular right, your life was guided by transcendent values, doesn't that suggest an association between a conservative point of view and a (latent?) religious disposition?

I would generalise such an association, which might not be allowed by individuals, and do away with the concept of the secular right.

These are pretty heavily represented in the blogosphere, in political science, in free-market economics, and some conservative-/ republican-type politicians believe this in private but do not act upon it when in office, for various reasons.

I have met several such people in the UK, some well known and powerful.

This group is electorally weak (maybe 15 percent in the US?), but intellectually influential - indeed they are probably the intellectual leadership of the right.

And, importantly, even those intellectual leaders of the right who are Christian *invariably* argue form a secular and utilitarian perspective (e.g. Roger Scruton - who is perhaps the most influential right wing intellectual of recent years in the UK).

If you are saying that the secular right, as represented heavily in the blogosphere, while 'secular' are not truly of 'the right', I would agree.

I am not intending here to demonstrate that the Christian right is coherent. Obviously it is coherent, since such polities existed and were sustained over many generations.

But I am hoping that these questions will provoke thought about first principles among the secular right.

Political conservatism, it seems to me, is complemented by a conservative view of human conduct. It seems inconsistent to have secular/relative views on moral questions, for instance, while claiming to be conservative on political questions.

Michael Oakeshott observes......"it is said the conservative in politics is so by virtue of holding certain religious beliefs; a belief, for example, in a natural law to be gathered from human experience, and in a providential order reflecting a divine purpose in nature and in human history to which it is the duty of mankind to conform its conduct and departure from which spells injustice and calamity."

This observation indicates that the "secular right" becomes a contradiction in terms if its principles are analysed rigorously, I think.

Unfortunately, I must add that Oakeshott goes on to contend that what makes a conservative disposition in politics intelligible has nothing to do with natural law or a providential order, and nothing to do with morals or religion.

At root this is just one question: what would be different about your desired secular society which would plausibly make it self-maintaining when all previous secular societies have become progressively more self-destroying?

All societies rise and fall over time, regardless of what memes they are based on. Religion is no different than any other meme, such as communism, socialism, or nazism; in that it serves the same psychological function. Religion and non-religious ideologies occupy the same "meme-niche" in the human brain. Thus, from the standpoint of psychology, there is no difference between a religious ideology and a non-religious ideology. I consider religion strictly as a psychological phenomenon, nothing more.

I would say that innovation and productive accomplishment as foundational values for a civilization are the best guarantee of long-term sustainability. Obviously, societies that place a premium on such will out-compete those that do not. The next century may belong to the Chinese.

For sure, we need to develop the technology to make large scale human settlement of space possible. Large scale space settlement will lead to a multiplicity of social systems, allowing greater range of experimentation of social systems (this is much of what the seasteading concept is about, check out www.athousandnations.com). Through such a meta-system of many competitive social system will more effective forms of social organization emerge. I think it silly to believe that all possible forms of social organizations (and philosophical worldviews) have all been invented and that there is nothing new to be invented.

In any case, only when we become a space-faring species will human civilization become truly immortal.

1. My ideal society would look pretty much like the Shire. There is no religion in the Shire (at least the hobbits do not seem to concern themselves much with it).

The core values of the hobbits are reasonableness, good manners and a certain cultural reserve and innate conservatism accompanied by a distrust of foreign notions and new-fangled contraptions. Also, when push comes to shove, they display an admirable toughness and endurance.

2. The Shire is for hobbits but Big Folk are welcome, in reasonable numbers, if they respect the ways and customs of the inhabitants.

Magical folk are treated with suspicion - sort of the same way I treat Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons - but if they prove themselves to be harmless and entertaining (eg. by providing fireworks) they will be tolerated and even warmly welcomed.

3. No doubt hobbit society has is malcontents (see Sandyman and the Sackville-Bagginses) but they are handled in much the same way a family handles its black sheep. If doom comes to the Shire, it will not be because of the moral failings of the hobbits. Only an external force could bring down the Shire.

4. Motivations of the hobbits: beer, pipeweed, parties (rather like a university pub, but with better music).

Adventures and innovations are treated warily. The Shire by itself is admittedly too weak to defend its idyllic and entirely secular society by itself. A guardian force of tough minded stoics is required, like the good wizards or the Rangers (or even the United States Marines at a pinch). These people, somewhat sadly, will always be considered outsiders by the Shire-folk, but the guardians would not have it any other way. They are Orwell's rough men standing ready in the night.

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My little fantasy has a point. The Shire is an almost universally admired society whose values most people - whether religious or secular - find appealing. I do not believe that it would be improved by having churches and a priesthood-appointed God King to rule over the Shire instead of having democratically elected mayors presiding in Michel Delving the way the hobbits prefer. Some of the mayors will be villains, no doubt, but occasionally a Master Samwise will turn up. They muddle through.

Sensible folk, hobbits.

The Shire is clearly based on an idealized England. I think it is telling that even the deeply religious JRR Tolkien didn't have the heart to ruin it by making it overtly non-secular.

1. An absolute monarch/CEO, responsible to a board of trustees, responsible to financial beneficiaries (ie, a sovereign corporation).

2. Coherent authority is not fissiparous. See #3.

3. Radicalism, etc, are tempting because these ideologies collectively empower their believers. In a state that does not leak power, they lose their attraction and disappear naturally.

Intellectuals are not inherently liberal. They are liberal if and only if liberalism is empowering. Intellectuals in Nazi Germany were attracted to Nazism, not democracy. Intellectuals in golden-age Spain were attracted to Catholicism, not democracy. Intellectuals (almost all) in Elizabethan England were attracted to the Virgin Queen, not democracy.

Divided authority is entropic and autocatalytic - like rust, cancer, etc. It can be cured, but it has to be cured all the way. The more of it you have, the harder it is to kill.

4. Present regimes have no trouble suppressing right-wing dissent, violent or nonviolent. They simply need to apply these mechanisms to the left. Precedents, modulo this mutation, are not hard to find.

Now, that said, absolute sovereignty means absolute - spiritual as well as temporal authority. But the dream of a theologically homogeneous political community is implausible in the Western world as it exists today.

So what? Various sects of Christianity did just fine under the Ottoman sultans. I suspect a responsible 21st-century atheist CEO-King would both encourage and control religion in a very Ottoman fashion, perhaps even requiring every subject to choose a confession and delegating authority to communal hierarchs. Atheism could then be treated as what it is - just another religious sect, without any material evidence to disprove any of the others.

Getting there from here? Well, that's a piece of work. But at least I know what I want.

It would, however, require creatures of Hobbit-nature, rather than Man-nature - especially in terms of their lack of pride and power seeking. And this implies a kind of limited transhumanism - to re-engineer humans.

Tolkien did not actually admire The Shire (although he very much liked much about it); but only those Hobbits who had a yearning for higher things. He comments somewhere that he would otherwise find normal Hobbits almost unbearable - becuase they would be more like the Gaffer or Ted Sanyman, than any of the heroes of LotR.

Specifically he said that Sam minus his fascination and reverence for the elves would not be the admirable person he is.

But your point is well made!; nonetheless it could be answered best by further study of Tolkien, especially his letters, or of his (scattered) religious writings - such as the Marring of Men -

For Tolkien death was the primary problem, and to be unaware of the gravity of death (as perhaps Hobbits were) is not an answer. It is, indeed, the psuedo-answer of modernity - to be so distracted from the question as to cease to be able to conceptualize it.

One step further and we get the aspiration to life like in a euphoric drugged stupor (where I live this is often an explicit objective, and worked at very hard by a significant minority of the populace).

But then, if life is something to be avoided - why not just die now and have done with it? (This is NOT meant as a suggestion! - merely a reductio ad absurdum.)

I am not intending here to demonstrate that the Christian right is coherent. Obviously it is coherent, since such polities existed and were sustained over many generations.

Christian polities existed in the past, but that doesn't mean they are viable for the future. I sincerely doubt that religion in any way like it's traditional form is ever going to make a comeback among the intelligent. Too much doubt has been introduced into the system. Biblical scholarship, skeptical philosophy, Darwin have permanently taken it down a peg. Of course, despite all the protestations of Dawkins etc., they most certainly have not totally refuted the religious view, but they have introduced enough uncertainty into the system, that things will not ever be the same. For example, we used to have no materialist explanation for how such marvelous creatures as we ourselves could come into existence. Supernaturalism used to be the obvious explanation. That's gone and it ain't coming back.

@Mencius Moldbug - As you know, I have been heavily influenced by your work, and followed you pretty much all the way through your analysis and advocacy.

Having arrived at which point I found it insufficient, because so shallow and disenchanted.

Sometime *after* this I became a Christian.

Yours is a rational and explicit kind of hedonism - being based on the assumption that avoidance of violence, pain, and suffering are the primary objectives in life: a Buddhist kind of perspective of life as this-worldly (no place for immortal souls), and as essentially suffering, which must be minimized or eliminated.

You aim to minimize human suffering by social organization rather than by disciplined meditation, but the hope is similar.

This leaves out far too much of human nature, which is why it would not work - people don't even want it, and if they had it they would not 'fight' to keep it because to fight to keep what you have always entails definite personal suffering in the immediate short term in the vague hope that 'other people' would benefit in the contingent long term.

Why, indeed, would a person who wants to avoid suffering be bothered about other people at all? Because other peoples' suffering makes themselves suffer? Yes indeed, but surely the most direct answer to this personal discomfort is to obliterate the discomfort (with distraction, drugs, or disciplined work - whatever works) rather than to reform the world?

And why would anyone whose main priority was to avoid suffering want to do anything so paradoxical as to try and refrom the world? Of course they don't; although they may appreciate the intellectual distraction of formulating and implementing utopian schemes...

The place I am coming-from is the modern pervasive reality of the disenchantment of the world, of the craving for meaning and purpose, of alienation, of modern life as merely bureaucratic procedures and subjective desires - and of their incompatibility and mutual irrelevance.

A society such as you envisage would have many advantages, but probably make the core problem of disenchantment even worse!

And this is why I believe it would not 'work'. People would, as they do now, continually and spontaneously be acting to destroy what they had.

In this, the simplest argument is to look at the success of Islam in displacing modernity (conveniently charted by Huntington).

The vary fact that this process *could*, in theory, so easily be stopped by modernity is the opposite of reassuring to advocates of modernity - the fact is that it is *not* being stopped, but instead assisted.

That is, indeed, the most decisive this-worldly argument against modernity; that modernity is a sickness part of which is seeking its relief in suicide (non-reproduction, obliteration of consciousness) rather than cure.

If we saw animals behaving in the way that modern humans behave (reproductive suppression, wirehead hedonism) we would conclude either that they were very sick indeed, or that they were living in an environment so profoundly alien that it had driven them into permanent psychosis.

Your third question applies to all reactionaries, whether secular or religious. No matter how far you turn back the clock -- before PC, before the Enlightenment, before the Reformation, before the Great Schism, before Christ, before Socrates, before Thales, take your pick -- what is to stop history from playing itself out again and bringing us right back to where we are now?

Each stage in the history of the West led to the next. Unless a given historical change can be shown to be a freak accident, unlikely to happen again in similar circumstances, any reactionary project to revert to what came before is suspect.

To avoid welfarism and regulation, have to abolish universal franchise. Only taxpaying heads of families should vote. Alternatively feudalism, monarchy, or anarcho capitalism - all of which are more likely than mass democracy surviving the present crisis.

What do I want? I want to scoff chocolate eclairs to the sound of Beiderbecke's cornet. Chicken liver pate with celery and claret, accompanied by Haydn string quartets. I want to drink a Central Otago Pinot Noir while watching the Marriage of Figaro. Chablis, oysters and Beethoven. A pipe of Balkan Sobranie and a glass of Islay malt.

Most of them are over-powered from without. Some fall apart. Apparently very few civilizations have actively destroyed themselves.

The second point (from Ernest Gellner) is that there are only two stable basic forms of society so far: hunter gatherer, and agrarian. Agrarian almost always overpowers HG.

Among sustained agrarian societies - religion is needed, in increasing amounts, to provide the social cohesion necessary for them to grow larger and more powerful. Especially since the emergence of monotheism.

Roughly speaking, the more devoutly religious an agrarian society (especially monotheist) - the larger is its *potenital* for growth (but not necessarily so, a religion may turn against the survival of its civilization - like Tibetan Buddhism)

Lacking sustained growth (especially growth in food supply, but also more generally growth in technological capability), our society would revert to agrarian; since post-industrial societies exist only for as long as productivity growth out-runs the Malthusian trap; and the resources for controlling populations by bribery (rather than by coercion and religion) are growing.

But the agrarian 'revert' for most of the societies in the world would probably be Islam - since that is pre-adapted to an agrarian polity, is already in place, is already very large, has proven itself capable of sustaining devoutness through thick and thin; and has been growing exponentially for a century or so, with a doubling time of about a generation.

The place I am coming-from is the modern pervasive reality of the disenchantment of the world, of the craving for meaning and purpose, of alienation, of modern life as merely bureaucratic procedures and subjective desires - and of their incompatibility and mutual irrelevance.

Oh, I don't at all disagree. My own strongest influence is Carlyle, and Carlyle as you know was a very Christian man - although one could say he had a Christianity of his own. He certainly went through a great crisis of faith in his youth. And he was no hedonist!

My ideal state (a) is run like a business, and (b) does the will of God. It seems to me that these criteria do not conflict, but reinforce each other from opposite perspectives - if you'll pardon the cliche, a wave-particle duality. I think God wants his kingdoms on Earth to be run like businesses, and I think that if you run a kingdom like a business you'll find yourself doing the will of God - whether or not you ascribe any sort of reality to Him.

"God" for the Carlylean atheist is a fictional character, like Hamlet. Dear atheist, do you believe in the material reality of Hamlet? Does this prevent you from (a) reading Shakespeare, (b) imagining the person of Hamlet, (c) describing certain actions as characteristic or uncharacteristic of Hamlet?

"God," for instance, solves or at least greatly ameliorates the is-ought problem. What is good? What is justice? What is right? In each case, it is the will of God - for it's clear that if we define an ungood, unjust, unrighteous deity as "God," we are just abusing the English language. We certainly can't define good as the will of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Does this solve anything? No, the secularist might say, because we cannot see or speak to God, at least not in any reproducible way. Wrong! We cannot see God, but we can imagine God - our post-ape brains are very good at (a) personifying imaginary characters, (b) submitting to higher authorities, (c) obeying moral codes.

Thus a fruitless debate of "ought" becomes a fruitful debate of the nature of God. One ought to eat babies, I say. You disagree. Can we continue conversing? We cannot, Hume tells us. Hume is right.

But if I say, God wants us to eat babies, I have to construct the character of a baby-munching God. You in turn can criticize my baroque construction - just as if I'd written a "Hamlet II" in which Hamlet ate babies. Thus the debate is fruitful, in that (a) we have stuff to talk about, (b) spectators can tell which of us is an ass.

In short, I simply don't see any real conflict between atheist and Christian visions of reaction. For all sorts of reasons (child-rearing among them), I would much rather be a Christian, or even a Muslim - but I'm not, and I can't change that.

There's a story that Oriana Fallaci spoke to John Paul II and asked His Holiness how, as an atheist, she should live her life. "You don't believe in God?" the Pope said. "No problem - just act as if you did." I suspect there are precious few atheists who are physically incapable of understanding or following these instructions - and even fewer who could act as if they believed in the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

@dearieme - do you want a society where *everybody* can, or perhaps *must*, do these things?

Ooh, I'm enough of a liberal (British sense)that I want the minimum of "musting" compatible with an ordered society. (I do wonder what that minimum is.) I think it's no business of mine to want that everyone can do these things, not least because I'm confident that lots of people (= nearly everyone) wouldn't want them anyway. But out of a vague benevolence, I'd say that it would be wonderful if the world were such that everyone could, if they so desired, indulge in equivalent pleasures. But I'm very aware of how much death and destruction has been wrought by people who claimed that they wanted to change the world in that direction.

Or are you content to be the only one?

I'll cheat, take you literally, and say "no"; all of these activities would be enormously more of pleasurable if indulged in with like-minded friends or lovers.

@MM - I am familiar with the line here - but non-supernaturalist Christians are (on average) among the most politically correct of all people in the world. e.g. a major seedbed of US PC was the New England transcendentalists/ Unitarians.

If you live for comfort, you cannot defend that which you live for. It is too uncomfortable.

I have been re-reading Pascal (in the Peter Kreeft edition) and for P the cleavage point is not between Christians and atheists; but between wretched atheists and contented atheists: (roughly) because the wretched atheists are seekers, and those who seek are assured that they shall indeed find.

So, even when an atheist, as long as you are wretched you will be OK in the end, or I should say *before* the end...

There is no doubt that great suffering, richly earned over centuries, awaits the post-Puritan atheist and/or his descendants. Atheism is not to be confused with "Universalism" - it is just one feature of that worldview. One can also be a Buddhist atheist, a Stoic atheist, etc. Or even a reactionary atheist. Birds and bats both fly, but flying is not a synapomorphy between them.

I strongly recommend a perusal of Maistre's Considerations on France for a discussion of these issues. Maistre's theodicy is almost diabolically clever. Unfortunately for an 18th-century work, no English translation is available online. (But while verifying this statement, I stumbled across this very interesting work of Calonne.)

If my faith was that of Maistre, I would say that some heinous and barbaric apocalypse, probably at the hands of Muslims or similar, maybe in 30 to 50 years, was God's impending punishment for hedonistic Universalism. As a damned atheist, however, I must persist in my belief that acts of man can avert this catastrophe which we both perceive. Doesn't mean they will, however. To Christian and heathen alike I commend the dedication of the Latter-Day Pamphlets: "Nay, by God, Donald, we must help Him to mend it!"

@MM - "I must persist in my belief that acts of man can avert this catastrophe which we both perceive."

Agreed. Or at least delay, if not avert.

And delay in the medium term not the short term.

('Charlton's Law states that things can only get better in the medium-long-term after getting worse in the short-medium-term. So whatever is best for us in the longer term will 'always' make things worse in the short term - otherwise we would already be doing it.)

But avert how?

I believe it could *only* come via Christian faith including repentance.

Purely secular 'acts' (e.g. policies) will 'backfire' - and no matter how pragmatic they may seem to be, will make things worse (overall, in the medium-long-term) rather than better - because pragmatism strengthens the selfish, this-worldly and hedonic bottom-line of modern life that is the ultimate cause of the problem.

1. I want modern humanity and its even more compasssionate descendants to rule over the solar system and following that, the galaxy until the stars run out.

Yes, it is a wishlist. But it is also strung together with the ideas of simplified humanism.

http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/simplified

2. It might be possible, if an AI, run with ideas of extrapolated volition of humanity rules humanity.

The main mechanism I could see in place is the cessation of death. It is an extremely strong mechanism. Combined with the impossibility of individuals ever coming to power due to the presence of the AI singleton, it wil prevent this society from recapitulating the course of exiting western societies.

4. Fun will continue to motivate people. The complete expression of all the things that evolution built into us. Love of food, sex and learning.

"At root this is just one question: what would be different about your desired secular society which would plausibly make it self-maintaining when all previous secular societies have become progressively more self-destroying?"

Nothing.

And your mistake is to take that as a critique of the pagan right, which you lump together with the secular right.

Before, you argued that the alteration of the West was inevitable and concluded that the pagan-secular right was without point. My reply was that death is also inevitable, yet that does not render the preservation of life without point. Now you argue that sickness is inevitable, and conclude as you did before.

It is the way of things that any individuals, civilizations, cultures -- and faiths for that matter -- will grow sick, often gravely. It is the way of things that individuals, civilization, and cultures will die. One can not prevent the latter, but one can try to prevent the former form prematurely becoming the latter.

"What is it that you want?"

What everyone wants: Self definition and continuity. Where the religious find this in and through their transcendent, pagan rightist finds this in and through their folklore, histories, and familial ties. When traditions are interwoven with religion, both the religious right and pagan right have a common, often indistinguishable, interest.

About Me

Professor Bruce G Charlton. My latest book is now available online: addictedtodistraction.blogspot.co.uk . Comments are moderated pretty harshly - e.g. I don't publish comments that badmouth me or subvert the blog post (after all, what would be the point of *that*?). Readers are welcome to email me at brucedot charltonat outlookdotcom